Danny Wallace: With friends like these... One man's hunt to find his old classmates

The changes started without me noticing. But like birds escaping the trees at the first flicker of a distant earthquake, the signs had been there ever since I'd moved to my smart new home in a smart new area of North London. It was an area which was going places.

An area where everyone was married and did brunch and drank lattes and dined at Latvian restaurants. Where the men wore trendy little oblong glasses and the ladies wore skinny jeans, ate croissants and read the papers on a Sunday morning in a place with a battered leather sofa.

What ridiculous cliched thirtysomethings, I thought, as I sat dipping my croissant in my brunchtime latte. What must they make of me here? I'm a maverick. A free-spirited 29-year-old. And my glasses only trendy and oblong.

But then came the morning that my wife, Lizzie, witnessed something terrifying. 'What are you doing?' she said, wideeyed, as she watched me walking into the kitchen.

'I'm just taking this mug to the sink,' I said.

There was silence. And then, as we realised what was happening - what this signified - how this was the first time in my life I had ever taken a mug to the sink within two days of finishing my tea, I stopped dead in my tracks and we simply stared at each other in horror.

We had felt the first tremors of the earthquake. It was getting closer.

Soon, the evidence began to pile up. The fridge was my early warning system. Gone were the Herta frankfurters and processed cheese of just a year or two before, when I was single. In were skimmed milk and hummus, and baby carrots and fresh spinach. We'd gone organic, we were buying Fairtrade, we had crisp white wine instead of cans of Stella.

Clubs had become bars, nights down the pub had slowly morphed into intimate dinners with close friends. I ate low-fat pretzels with crushed rock salt where once Wotsits would have done.

How had this happened? Could it actually be true? At 29, was I really on the brink of finally, undeniably, irrefutably becoming an adult?

Surely not. I wasn't a man. I was a boy. I had a silly, ungrown-up job, for starters - writing columns and hosting quiz shows.

School theme: Danny as a television presenter

But steadily, the tremors got stronger. We started buying fresh bread. We visited a farmers' market and bought some olives, despite the fact that very few local farmers in this part of London have ever actually farmed an olive.

I wanted to talk to Lizzie about what was happening, but she seemed so comfortable, so at ease with this slide into domesticity, that it never seemed the right moment.

Then she brought home some display cushions. Not for bottoms, for display only. She also bought some sticks which she stuck in a jar and convinced me were a 'dramatic focal point' for our living room.

I smiled and hid the copy of Kung Fu Soccer I'd bought that afternoon in HMV. In the evening, I poured out my heart over a pint with my mate, Ian.

'What's happening to me, Ian?' I asked. 'I don't want to be one of those men you see wandering around Ikea or the linen section of John Lewis. You know the ones - lost souls who discuss congestion charging and wear jeans with elasticated waists.'

'It nearly happened to me,' said Ian, heavily. And then, with real gravitas: 'I even bought a juicer.'

I remembered that. He'd drunk nothing but carrot juice for six weeks and his elbows turned yellow.

'I managed to pull back from the brink,' said Ian. 'That's what you have to do. Before you become a Stepford Man.'

'What if it's too late?' I said, panicked and nervy. 'What if I've already become one of Them? Just the other day . . . God, I can't believe I'm going to tell you this . . .'

Ian closed his eyes and waved me on.

'I saw a girl walking through town. I could see her midriff, and . . .' Ian leaned forward. 'And I tutted, Ian. I bloody tutted.'

'You tutted?' He was outraged. This was worse than he thought.

'It was Ian.' 'You tutted at a lady's midriff!'

'Magic FM said it was likely to get worse in the afternoon. I hoped that my tutting might be a subtle warning of the forecast ahead.'

Ian shot back into his seat. 'Magic FM? You were listening to Magic FM?'

'They do all the hits from the Seventies, Eighties, and the best of today, Ian! It's not my fault, it's just so feelgood.'

'Dan - stop talking like this.'

'The other night we had pitta and hummus and I even asked for more hummus.'

'Dan, you're scaring me, please. . .'

'I like my pine nuts lightly toasted, Ian.'

'Dan ...' 'I can ask for a bill in Latvian.'

'Stop talking this way.'

I slammed my hands over my mouth. I had to stop these demons escaping! Ian was right. I had lost my way. I needed to reconnect with my roots. But how? That's when the box arrived.

My parents had cleaned out their loft and had posted me some bits and pieces that Mum thought 'might come in handy'. Inside, I found the contents of my childhood.

Schoolboy Danny heads to school to meet the friends he would later hunt down

There were letters, schoolbooks, the scrapbook I'd kept when I was ten (I'd wittily Tippexed out the 's') and lots of old badges. An 'I am seven' badge. A Tufty Club badge. My Dennis The Menace Fan Club badge.

And look at this. My first place certificate in the North Leicestershire Schools Swimming Association under-tens boys breaststroke competition, March 18, 1986. First place! You probably remember it yourself, because it was all anyone on my street was talking about. The day I became a winner!

OK, so it probably remains the only race I have ever won in my life, on land, sea or air.

But my mind drifted back to the magical day I had to stand up in school assembly to accept my certificate; an experience marred only by the fact that some official had got my name wrong, so when I read it, it did not read 'Daniel Wallace' but 'P. Walls' instead.

They didn't even give me a new certificate. Just stuck a small white sticker over the front and wrote my name in Biro. They wouldn't have done that at the Olympics, so why they should do it at Holywell Junior School is anyone's guess.

Anyway, back to the box. Football stickers... old photos... more old photos... and a smooth, sleek black book. I recognised that instantly. My grandma had given it to me, and I'd been inordinately proud of it. It was the address book I kept for my very special friends - the most important people I knew.

And now here it was once more. On the back, I'd written in an excited, blue scrawl: 'Friends forever!!!' I opened it and started to flick through.

Guirrean! There were 12 in total, with their addresses and phone numbers all noted down in my very neatest handwriting.

I had lots of friends as a kid, so these special 12 must have meant a lot to me.

I smiled, laughed, and flicked through them again. Where were they now? Were they happy? They'd all be about to turn 30, too. How were they dealing with it? Did they feel like me? Like they weren't quite ready?

I had a strange sense of homesickness for the past. Homesickness for a time when friends used to be pretty much all anyone cared about. How had life changed so much?

We used to be able to spend days together, not just minutes. We never had to arrange anything, just turn up. Never fix a date, shift a meeting or consult the diary. Friends came first - so what had happened? Why wasn't I with a friend right now?

I looked at Anil Tailor's old telephone number. I paused for a second. Anil, whose mum used to force-feed me curries until I was nearly sick. Anil, who dressed as a cowboy for Wild West day at school. I pressed 'dial'.

Next thing I knew, I was on the train to Loughborough. Anil was living in Huddersfield now, but by coincidence he'd come back home to see his family. He picked up my message and invited me straight up to see him.

Loughborough station hadn't changed one bit in the 16 years since I'd last seen it. But then, it soon became clear that nothing much <cite>at all </cite>had changed in Loughborough.

You can get a sense of the place from the local paper. These are four genuine headlines from the Loughborough Echo, which all ran in the same edition this year: Stranger stared at by locals. Town nearly had trams. Moth captured on film. And my favourite: No one injured in accident.

My family moved around a lot when I was a kid, because my Dad was an academic and kept switching jobs. But I'd managed to spend six happy years in Loughborough. Happy years of cycling around, running about, playing conkers...

Ah, yes. Playing conkers. One of the things in that box from my parents was a cutting from the Loughborough Echo about me winning a conker competition at my primary school at the age of nine. As you may have gathered, for the Loughborough Echo, no story is too small.

Trouble is, I didn't really win. In the final, Timothy Sismey sent my prize conker, Brutus, scattering in splinters across the school hall, in full view of more than 200 excited children. The pain of defeat was made all the worse by the Echo's inaccurate coverage.

'Congratulations!' family friends would say. 'I read about the conker competition.' And I would then have to tell them that they were mistaken, that Timothy Sismey was the real victor and that I had come second.

In that moment, I would see their respect and admiration for me dwindle, so I'd tell them about the under-tens swimming competition. But I just knew as they walked away they were thinking: 'I'm sure. Walls won that...'

I wandered out of the station. And there, by the entrance, was the man I had come to see.

Crikey. An uncle. Anil didn't look old enough to be a nephew - in fact, he still looked like the boy I used to know.

I'm not saying he was wearing tiny velour running shorts and a Ninja Turtles top. He was a smartly dressed architect now. But there was something in his eyes. Something-to do with the fact that here we were, together again. A kind of childish glee. 'So to what do I owe the pleasure?' asked Anil.

'I just realised it'd been so long,' I said. 'I mean, I got this box from my parents. . . '

'Check it out!' Anil said, pointing at a coach ahead of us. The sign on the back read 'Walker Coaches'.

'Remember Andrew Walker from school? That's one of his coaches.'

Blimey. So Andrew Walker was now Loughborough's premier coach magnate. He probably had a red leather chair and smoked cigars.

I still thought of him as the kid whose stink bomb accidentally went off in his pocket during assembly one day. He was also the first of us to admit that he got funny feelings when he saw Sue Ellen from Dallas in the shower.

'What about the other guys? Do you know anything about them?'

'Remember Richard De Rito?' 'Yeah. His dad ran the Mazda dealership. He had a different car each week. Richard told us it was because he was in the witness protection programme.'

'He's married now. Louisa Needham, she's married as well. To a Guy.'

'A guy?' 'No - a Guy. A guy called Guy.' 'Louisa was the first girl I sent a Valentine to,' I said. 'She was obsessed with Shakin' Stevens. I wonder if Guy looks like Shaky - that would mean Louisa's life had worked out as planned. I used to hang out in her house. I'd play Jet Set Willy in her brother's room.'

Michael? He was the second name in my book, and next target in my quest: of course I remembered him. 'He's still in Loughborough,' said Anil. 'We should surprise him.'

I was beaming. This would be fun. Random, risky . . . and not at all grown-up.

As we drove into the town centre, I was starting to get my bearings. We went past Charnwood Music, where Mum had signed me up to illfated guitar lessons with a man named Roger.

We fell out when it became clear he was teaching me Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, rather than Michael Jackson's Thriller.

And there was the Curzon Cinema. I thought back to my ninth birthday, when Mum had treated me and half a dozen friends to see the new action film in town - Red Sonja. Sadly, it wasn't until the film started that anyone realised that the Curzon had put the wrong audience ratings up.

Someone had placed a PG where a 15 should have been, and Mum was too embarrassed to move us as we all sat there, wide- eyed and mildly traumatised, as heads flew across the screen, swords cut through faces and blood spurted violently from sockets where arms should have been.

Then Brigitte Nielsen gave Arnold Schwarzenegger a 'special hug', at which point Mum tried to distract us by dropping a pound on the floor and shouting: 'Scramble!'

And there - on the corner. McDonald's. That might not seem a big thing to you, but the arrival of McDonald's in Loughborough was absolutely one of the defining moments of the late Eighties. Even Moscow had one before we did.

The day it opened, you got to meet Ronald McDonald himself. I was so impressed. He'd obviously come over specially from the States - he must've looked ridiculous on the plane - and in what I could only assume was an effort to fit in, he'd even adopted a gruff local accent.

He was calling people 'me duck' and seemed to know his way around town already. I even heard him grumbling to his mate about the one-way system.

McDonald's soon became a firm part of our Saturday afternoons - as established as the Woolworths pick 'n' mix counter and a walk around the market, marvelling at the stolen Liverpool tops and knock-off A-Team duvet covers.

'Shall we go to your old house?' said Anil.

So we drove down Forest Road and up towards Spinney Hill Drive. Number 63 looked a lot smaller than it used to. They'd put up a basketball net, and a new window in the roof, but they weren't fooling anyone - the house had shrunk.

How weird that someone else was living there now. Sleeping in my room. Hanging out in my garden. Eating in my kitchen.

A curtain twitched and a middle-aged lady stared out at us with what looked like real concern in her eyes.

I waved, as if to say: 'Hi! I used to live here!' but then realised we were essentially two men parked outside her house staring at her property. And now I was waving at her, as if to say: 'Hi! Me and my friend are going to rob you!'

We drove off to Michael's place. Standing on his doorstep, I was suddenly worried. What if he didn't remember me?

Michael had been a gentle, sensitive boy with a strange passion for martial arts. I had it, too - we'd all been to see The Karate Kid II at the Curzon. For a while I insisted that everyone called me Daniel-San - just as I'd insisted my dad called me Indy after watching Raiders Of The Lost Ark for the fourth time.

But that was the past. This was now, and the door was opening. There stood a man. He had Michael Amodio's face. But he was a man!

'Jesus Christ!' he said.

'Come in!'

Michael was now a chef at Loughborough University and had obviously been working out. He'd gone from a six-stone weakling to a bit of a muscle-man. But I was pleased to see he hadn't changed in other ways. We were surrounded by Xbox discs and Stallone DVDs.

'I'd have cleaned up if I'd known you were coming,' he said. 'And I'd have done something about my hair.'

He pointed to the side of his head. There was a large patch of hair missing. 'Tried to cut it last night with an electric razor. Didn't work quite as well as I'd hoped.'

I pulled up the sleeve of my shirt and showed him a burn on my skin. 'My shirt was a bit creased the other day,' I said. 'I tried to iron it while I was wearing it.'

Michael shook his head. 'It's tricky being grown-up. You're just expected to guess your way through. No one teaches you these things at school.'

It was as if we'd never been apart. Michael introduced us to his girlfriend, Nikol, a belly dancer from the Czech Republic. Then he told us all about his time in the Army. 'The CS gas was fun. They spray it in your face during training. It's really funny.'

'Funny?' 'Yeah,' he said, with no hint of irony or sarcasm. 'You start coughing and crying, but afterwards it's hilarious. Everyone's rolling around in pain trying not to get water on their face because that intensifies the pain.'

'It sounds. . . great,' I said. All too soon, it was time to go. 'How's the family?' I asked as we went out.

'My brother's a policeman now,' said Michael. 'He gave up the stripping.'

'The stripping?' 'Yeah. Natural Born Thrillers, they called themselves. Very successful - went to Greece and everything. But he gave it up after there was a riot in Middlesborough. Sixty drunk women went mental when he was late on stage.'

I didn't know what to do with this information. 'Let's go and find Simon Gibson,' said Anil. 'He's manager of the Toby Carvery in Colwick.'

Simon Gibson - the third name in my address book! I jumped back into the Mini.

In the late Eighties in middle England, the Toby Carvery was the height of exclusive dining. Red carpets, attentive staff and that warm and inviting glow you see in films set in Victorian times.

Not only did they offer quality meats at reasonable prices, but if you were a dedicated visitor to 'Tobies' you could also buy individual Toby jugs - mass-produced clay jugs in the shape of a grotesque man's face, which - if you had enough of them on your mantlepiece - could instantly knock thousands of pounds off the value of your property.

Now I was returning to that cosy, clay world.

'I demand to see the manager!' I said to the waitress at the front, in what I had intended to be an amusing voice but which seemed to terrify her.

'We're old friends,' chipped in Anil. But it didn't matter, because at that moment, just by the bar, I saw him.

'There he is,' I said. 'There's Simon Gibson!'

He had certainly grown up. In the old days, he'd been the scruffy kid at school, with a fringe that always needed an inch taken off. He'd worn the same tracksuit every day of the school holidays, and school shoes instead of trainers.

His brother called him fat; my mother said he was 'pleasantly plump' - which I think in the end may have done more damage.

But now the puppy fat had gone, and here he was. Smart. Suited. In control. He glanced at us. 'I don't believe it!' he said.

Simon was rightly proud of his work at the Toby. 'We run a tight ship,' he said. 'Three-and-a-half-thousand dinners a week. Twenty-five staff. We do have fun, but we get the work done. Which is important.'

Wow. Simon Gibson, managing his own Toby Carvery. I was genuinely impressed by how big it all sounded. His wife, Claire, worked there, too. 'She's amazing,' he said. 'The best thing I ever did was marry Claire. There are only two rules she sets me - no other women, no other men. Other than that, I'm as free as can be. Would you like to see my baby?'

Not quite what I'd expected, but Simon did seem a little further down the track of accepting adulthood than me. He had a job with 'manager' in the title. He had a dog.

And he'd even bought his midlife crisis car, about 15 years before he'd needed to.

He was embracing his move into the world of the thirtysomething with grace and gusto. He wasn't looking back to the past. He wasn't hung up on things that used to be important to him. . .

Hang about. What was that? Simon smiled. 'That, my friend, is a sealed, framed, original Back To The Future III movie poster, signed by Michael J. Fox.'

'Now that's impressive,' said Anil. 'The fact that it's signed?' 'The fact that your wife lets you hang it up in the living room.'

'I told you. She's so easygoing. Right. I'd better just go and feed the dog or Claire will go mental.'

'Do you fancy coming out for a pint with us and Michael Amodio?'

'Er. . . I might have to run that past Claire.'

That evening, we all met up in a pub in Loughborough (Simon got permission from Claire, so long as he didn't get back too late). 'To old friends,' said Michael, as we clinked glasses.

Instantly, the chat began. We discovered that Simon's dad was indeed - as we had guessed at the time but which Simon had furiously denied - the only man in Loughborough to have bought a Betamax video.

We discovered Anil was the one who changed the lyrics of 'He's Got The Whole World In His Hands' to 'He's Got The Whole World In His Pants' the day we all had to stay behind in assembly and apologise to Jesus.

We talked about the day our primary school burnt down. 'I'd left 60p in my drawer and some Micro Machines,' said Simon, mournfully. 'I'll never see them again.'

We even talked about time travel. 'I've got my own independent theory about it,' Simon suddenly announced.

To be honest, he lost us rather quickly with that one. But again, I was impressed. It's not often you meet a Toby Carvery manager who's solved the mysteries of time travel.

And then I changed the subject. Changed it to something I'd been wanting to ask since I'd first seen the boys again.

But how to phrase it? How to phrase a question that means so much? That contains so much angst and worry and paranoia?

'Can I ask you all something?' I said, slowly. 'Has anyone here . . .' I still didn't know quite how to put it. 'What?' said Anil.

'Has anyone else here,' I said, 'started listening to Magic FM?'

There were coy looks around the table. No one made eye contact. No one seemed keen to speak. Was I the only one worried about growing old?

And then Michael coughed, softly, and spoke. 'I wouldn't say I was a regular listener,' he said.

'Sometimes it's on in the background,' said Simon.

'It's just so feelgood,' said Anil. 'They do all the hits.'

Thank God. Thank God it wasn't just me. Here we were, four nearly men, each sharing a terrible admission of guilt.

I felt a surge of warmth towards my friends. OK, I hadn't seen them for the best part of 20 years. But we were all the same age; we'd gone through the same things in different ways.

We'd continue to do so for the rest of our lives, even if we never met again. There would always be a connection.

It was at that moment that I knew. I knew that I couldn't rest until I tracked down every one of those 12 special names in my address book. Whatever the cost, wherever it took me, I would follow this quest to the end!

So how about starting with Cameron Dewa? The last I heard, he was living in Fiji . . .

Extracted from Friends Like These by Danny Wallace, published by Ebury on July 3 at £11.99. Copyright of Danny Wallace 2008. To order a copy (p&p free), call 0845 606 4206.

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Danny Wallace: With friends like these... One man's hunt to find his old classmates